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You are treading on dangerous ground here 
looking straight up at the technology I would say AMD has the upper hand at this time, but who knows a year from now.
looking straight up at the technology I would say AMD has the upper hand at this time, but who knows a year from now.
My understanding is that it depends on the load.
Ok, it might, but just in the sense that Opteron is much faster than Intel on certain loads, and on others Opteron is just... a bit faster. 
Paulo
Some general comments, heard from analysts, etc.
About the only real technology advantage Intel (IA 32 with EM64T) holds over AMD (Opteron 64) at this point is a very good FPU (Floating-point Arithmetic Unit). They also have some of the best engineering and FAB facilities on the planet.
That being said, unless you are doing some high-end engineering calculations on your servers, a very good FPU isn't going to do you much good. What does is fast memory and I/O access. Unfortunately there, Intel has banked everything on large L3 caches, but basically utilizes the same NorthBridge chipset, which is basically a shared bus for processor/processor and processor/memory access, that has been around for 10 years or more. The more CPUs you have, the more contention on the bus, the worse the latency to main memory. AMD's HyperTransport on the other end as well as the fact that the memory controller is on the CPU, provides a significant memory access advantage. This is one of the things that ESX does a lot of, and it is why you consistently see people commenting on that in this forum.
A Gartner analyst basically has said that Intel's planning horizons seem to be a bit long, and they still take an engineering-centric focus when developing products. At the moment, AMD seems to be a little faster at introducing things and they tend to be more customer-centric in their planning. Meaning AMD tends to be delivering what customers want a little faster.
I'm not sure I agree with the notion that Intel will 'leap-frog' AMD in the near-term. Maybe if you look further out at their planning horizon. But unless Intel changes there processes for doing things, they risk the danger of continuing to come out with really neat stuff that nobody wants (IA64 is a great example).
Message was edited by:
GeorgeS
Cuz I didn't complete a thought. Happens with age.
About the only real technology advantage Intel (IA 32 with EM64T) holds over AMD (Opteron 64) at this point is a very good FPU (Floating-point Arithmetic Unit). They also have some of the best engineering and FAB facilities on the planet.
That being said, unless you are doing some high-end engineering calculations on your servers, a very good FPU isn't going to do you much good. What does is fast memory and I/O access. Unfortunately there, Intel has banked everything on large L3 caches, but basically utilizes the same NorthBridge chipset, which is basically a shared bus for processor/processor and processor/memory access, that has been around for 10 years or more. The more CPUs you have, the more contention on the bus, the worse the latency to main memory. AMD's HyperTransport on the other end as well as the fact that the memory controller is on the CPU, provides a significant memory access advantage. This is one of the things that ESX does a lot of, and it is why you consistently see people commenting on that in this forum.
A Gartner analyst basically has said that Intel's planning horizons seem to be a bit long, and they still take an engineering-centric focus when developing products. At the moment, AMD seems to be a little faster at introducing things and they tend to be more customer-centric in their planning. Meaning AMD tends to be delivering what customers want a little faster.
I'm not sure I agree with the notion that Intel will 'leap-frog' AMD in the near-term. Maybe if you look further out at their planning horizon. But unless Intel changes there processes for doing things, they risk the danger of continuing to come out with really neat stuff that nobody wants (IA64 is a great example).
Message was edited by:
GeorgeS
Cuz I didn't complete a thought. Happens with age.